On The Night Hike

You find yourself in the wilderness. It’s dark and you don’t really know where you are but there’s something inside you that knows you have to climb. Through the unrelenting darkness, you trek up a steep incline. At times it feels nearly vertical, but you move one leg after another trudging for what seems like forever. After a while, you reach a plateau. Looking down to where you started, an unfathomable distance fades away into the darkness. Under your feet is an undulating terrain that feels strange yet inviting. That thing inside you that pushed you to climb starts to chatter again, “Farther, higher, keep going.”

So, you look upwards and there it is, another peak towering in the shadows of the night. A part of you wonders if there will always be another mountain to climb but that thing inside you pipes up again and you start to walk. Instead of a wall, this time it begins with rolling hills. Soft ripples underfoot slow your progress but you continue, undeterred. Normally, the higher you go, the colder it gets… but for some reason, the temperature seems to have risen since you began your climb. You’d think about it more but it feels comforting in this strange dark realm.

The rolling folds turn into hills. The hills turn into foothills. The foothills turn into mountains and you find yourself laboring up sheer faces that are steeper than vertical. Footholds are plentiful, however, and you never feel like you’re in danger of falling…thank God because who knows what fate lies in the gaping maw of the darkness you’ve climbed out of.

As you traverse higher and higher a strange sensation passes through your feet…it feels like the surface under you is moving slightly, as if breathing. You think it must be the elevation or the dark getting to your nerves. You push whatever eldritch horror could be lurking in the dark out of your mind and you continue forwards and upwards.

Time seems to have no meaning in this darkness but after a while, the terrain changes again. You feel heat radiating from under your feet, as clearly as pavement that’s been baking in the summer sun. There’s some sort of grass growing from the ground too, you stop for a moment but resume walking.

Suddenly, the ground shifts like tectonic plates trying to rip the earth apart. You hang on for dear life, that grass the only thing keeping you anchored to the world. After what feel like the longest moments of your life, the movement stops, and calm returns. “What the fuck is going on,” you think to yourself.

After that last nightmarish experience, you try to pick your path more carefully. You walk and you climb and you walk and climb some more. As your mind begins to wander, you find yourself on another patch of warm grassy terrain. “Am I in the same place as before? Did I get turned around…”

Without warning enormous fingers thousands of times your size close in on you, squeeze you to within a millimeter of your life, and fling you what feels like a thousand miles. You land with a thud dazed but alive. You take stock of where you are…back where you started. You dust off your eight legs and start climbing again.

Anyway, that’s how I imagine the journey of the spider that crawled on me last night went.